How to handle and organize DTOs for different context?

Question

When using simple DTOs in various scenarios I have frequently run into the same kind of problem and I always wondered whether there's a better way to deal with it.

The thing is, I have a business object, e.g. Asset which has a bunch of properties, child objects and calculated fields, some of them expensive to calculate in sense of time, some of them huge in sense of data amonut. I need to use a different flavor of this object in various screens in the UI, e.g.

• in a tree where there is a hierarchy displayed and I don't need much more than the display name
• in a grid where I'm showing just a couple of properties
• in a detail pane where there's a big subset of available information, but still some of it (like mapped objects) is shown only on demand

To be able to achieve optimal performance with this scenario, I have always created different DTOs for each context, only containing the subset of information which is actually used in that context. While being a resource-optimal solution, this leads to couple of problems :

• I have a class explosion with huge number of DTO classes
• I have quite a hard time coming up with different names for the same thing like AssetDtoForGridInTheOverviewScreenInTheUpperPaneAboveTheSplitter, not to mention maintaining them later
• I am frequently repeating myself in the transformation methods, because there are properties that are used by most of the DTOs but not by all of them (therefore I can't put them into any superclass and reuse the transformation logic)

The technology I'm using is ASP.NET SOAP WebServices and C# 3.5, but I think somehow this could be a language-agnostic problem. Any ideas are welcome..

Answer 1

This is a known problem with DTOs. It's described in this otherwise mediocre articule on MSDN. To paraphrase: DTO is the most versatile n-tier data access pattern, but it also requires most work.

You can address some of your issues with mapping by using convention-based mapping, such as AutoMapper.

When it comes to class explosion, could it be that you are using too flat data structures?

This can be difficult to tell because DTOs naturally include a great deal of semantic repetition that turns out to not be logical repetition at all. For example, even if you have semantically similar types, if one is a ViewModel and the other is a Domain Object, they may share semantic structure, but have vastly different responsibilities.

If, on the other hand, you have a lot of repetition in the same application layer (e.g. UI), you may be violating the DRY principle. In this case, it may often help to encapsulate related data in what starts out as a flat data structure into a separate class. In most UI frameworks I'm aware of, you can still databind a flat display to a hierarchically structured class.

Answer 2

The problem of class explosion is inherent to the DTO approach, there probably isn't much you can do about that. Be careful not to mix your view-model with your DTO model. Your DTO's should only be used to get the data from your data tier to your front end and not for presentation.

With the advent of .NET 3.5 you can choose to implement some basic, more coarse grained DTO's and replace your ViewModel with an anonymous type which you can dynamically create off your DTO's. I found this to be avery flexible solution.

Regarding your naming conventions, it is probably useful to group your DTO's into scenarios and put them in a corresponding namespace. For example Solution.AssetManagement.Asset and Solution.AssetReporting.Asset